Wired Man and Other Freaks of Nature

by Sashi Kaufman

  He stood outside in the bushes with a group of guys and Molly Hamermesh, who seemed to appear any time a bowl was being passed around. He took the smallest hit possible without looking like a complete weenie and then stepped back from the circle. It was good weed, not the stuff that most people had that burned your throat and left a thick feeling in your mouth, like sucking on trash can lids. Afterward, he and Tyler walked out to the car without saying much.

  When they got to Tyler’s dad’s old Saab, they both walked toward the driver’s side. “Come on, man. Give me the keys,” Ben said.

  Tyler looked at him straight-faced. “I’m an excellent driver,” he said. Ben rolled his eyes. “Uh oh,” Tyler continued. “Fifteen minutes to Wapner. I’m an excellent driver. Kmart, gotta be Kmart.”

  Ben held out his hand for the keys and tried not to crack up. “I am an excellent driver,” Tyler said again, but he dropped the keys in Ben’s hand without an argument. “But you know I love it when you chauffeur me around.”

  When they got in the car, Tyler put his feet up on the dash and then down again. He fiddled with the radio, trying to find something he could sing along to. Pot always made Tyler hyper. At the bottom of the hill Ben turned left on to Beacon Street, which would take them over to Lower Falls where he lived. Tyler could text his mom—she was always up late—and crash on Ben’s floor. They hadn’t gotten very far when Tyler said, “Oh man, wait. Stop at Store 24.”

  Ben sighed. “There’s food at my house.”

  “Mmm, but are there Cheetos?”

  Ben crossed the double yellow line and flipped a U-turn in the middle of Beacon Street. “YES!” Tyler shouted. “Excellent decision! Excellent choice!”

  “Just Cheetos,” Ben cautioned. “Then we’re going home.”

  They sat in the parking lot of Store 24 with a family-sized bag of Cheetos between them. “This is disgusting,” Ben said as he tossed a couple of cheddar-coated cheese sticks into his mouth. “We’re definitely going to get some kind of cancer from this.” But they were so good. Each crunch set off a cheese Olympics in his mouth and prompted him to grab another handful. He leaned forward and took a big slurp of the blue raspberry slushie set between his knees. The ice at the bottom gave a hollow death rattle as it flew up the straw.

  “All right,” Tyler said, suddenly getting serious. “Who’s this?” He was holding a Cheeto, his fingers grasping the skinny end. It had a bulbous top with two large bumps.

  Ben cocked his head to the side. “Mrs. Oliphant,” he said decidedly, thinking of their heavyset World Studies teacher.

  Tyler nodded appreciatively. “Yup, yes, I see it. I was going to say Gabby Trudeau, but I think it could go either way.”

  “She’ll be Mrs. Oliphant in a few years anyway,” Ben said as he crunched a few more Cheetos. “How about this one?” He held up a long, skinny one. He was thinking of their soccer coach, Jack Sersich, but Tyler didn’t come up with it.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Tom?”

  “Which one?”

  “The one who runs track. The skinny one.”

  Ben just shrugged and popped the thing in his mouth. They were usually completely in sync. Tyler pawed through the bag. “Oh wait,” he said suddenly. “This is perfect.” He flicked on the dashboard light and held up the Cheeto specimen so Ben could get a good look. It was perfect. Ben knew exactly who it was too. “On three,” he said. “One, two, three.”

  “Julie Snow!” they both shouted out. Maybe it was the pot or the tension breaking from earlier in the night, but they both laughed so hard that Tyler started to blow slushie out his nose and Ben had to get out and take a leak behind the car so he didn’t piss himself.

  “Here,” Tyler said all seriously when Ben got back in the car, holding out the Julie Snow Cheeto. “I want you to have this.”

  “Thank you,” Ben said, crunching down hard on the bubbly top half that was Julie’s trademark ponytail.

  “I think she likes you.”

  “Nah,” Ben said. “She was just bored.”

  “Nope. I definitely think she likes you, man. She was at the very least seriously considering letting you, what did she say, slobber all over the side of her face?”

  “While I shove her hand down my pants,” Ben finished.

  Tyler shook his head. “That’s just wrong,” he said. “Completely unfair characterization of my moves.” Ben nodded but didn’t say anything. By senior year everyone just assumed you knew what they were talking about when they talked about hooking up. “I mean, I would at least squeeze her tits before I shoved her hand down my pants,” Tyler continued.

  “And she thought you weren’t very romantic,” Ben said.

  Tyler grabbed his chest and threw his head back like he’d been shot. He held the pose for a few seconds and then let his hand fall down at his side. He sat there staring up at the sky through the sunroof. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “It was a total dick move. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “It’s okay,” Ben said. He just wanted Tyler to stop before he said anything else about hearing aids or deaf kid jokes—anything else that would bring the content of his comment back into the foreground. He knew that Tyler understood that “it’s okay” did not mean that what he had said was okay, but rather that he was forgiven. He opened up the bag again and shook it around until he found what he was looking for. He held it up: a small stunted cheese curl indicating that they had reached the bottom of the bag and the end of the game. Tyler nodded. Ben leaned forward and started the car.

  “Time to go home,” he said.

  Chapter 2

  In the morning, Tyler was gone. He never actually slept over. He just lay on the floor next to Ben’s bed until his buzz wore off, and then sometime before dawn he crept out quietly.

  So the noise the next morning definitely wasn’t Tyler. It sounded like someone emptying the dishwasher while making sure to bang each individual glass plate into the other. Ben rolled over and tried to ignore the strip of bright light streaming in through the crack in his dark green curtains and the foul taste in his mouth, a mix of lemon vodka, Sprite, and Cheeto crumbs. “Hey!” he yelled out, knowing his voice wouldn’t carry out of the bedroom. “I’m only partially deaf, you know.”

  It was a joke he’d never make out in the world. He barely felt comfortable saying it when he knew no one could hear. Supposedly when you lost a sense, your other senses became enhanced to compensate for it. Ben hadn’t noticed any improvements in his vision, but sometimes the thoughts in his head were so loud he wanted to scream to block them out. And they weren’t even his thoughts. They were his, of course, but they came from the not-so-subtle comments of the kids in his class and the people around him. They were always staring, wondering what else was wrong with him.

  His mom could tell when it was really bothering him. He’d heard her talk to Dr. Usarian, the hearing specialist, about how he was adjusting—a word that always seemed to be emphasized whenever anyone was talking about him. For the first six years of his life he’d been normal, and then in first grade, when he’d failed the hearing screening, he had been cast out of the mainstream and made different by the plastic pieces he now had to wear in his ears. Supposedly it was easier for kids who’d always had to wear them, but he’d never gotten completely used to it. In first grade, kids don’t try and hide the fact that they’re staring, but it was more in a wondering kind of way. It was much worse in middle school. The looks turned into whispers, and he built the walls higher and thicker—the sum total of which was a tiny protected island with entrance granted to his family and Tyler, and really that was it.

  The only place he truly felt normal was at home. He was sure that the way he joked with his parents, the way they accepted and loved him, worried about him and annoyed him, was normal. Leaving for college wouldn’t just mean leaving his carefully structured social life; it would mean leaving them too. He was trying very hard not to think about what Julie had said or about the pile of college applicati
on materials sitting on his desk. What about the roommate he would be assigned for next year? Was hearing impaired something you had to list on one of those forms you filled out to be matched? What would his future roommate think? Worse, what if they matched him with some other partially functional loser?

  He pulled the pillow up over his head, hoping to muffle the thoughts and go back to sleep. Too gross: it smelled like Cheeto cheese and head sweat.

  There was a loud, purposeful rapping on the door.

  “Come on, Mom,” he yelled in the general direction of the hallway, but he was already clawing the nightstand for his hearing aids, not liking to be caught without them any more than he actually liked wearing them.

  The slick plastic fit snuggly in and around his ears. Instantly the sound of chirping birds outside his window came into focus. There was a tiny bit of relief, like finally scraping the bottom of the pool with your toes when you’ve been swimming in the deep end. He shook his head once to let his hair fall back into place and then let his head flop back on the pillow. Mom had opened the door and was standing in the doorway, pretending to find some cracked paint on the trim interesting.

  “What is it? What do you want?”

  “Honey, do you know what time it is?”

  “I don’t know. Ten? Eleven?”

  “It’s after noon, Ben,” she said reproachfully.

  He picked up his phone. “By like ten minutes,” he said, ignoring her glare. “I was getting up anyway.”

  “Don’t you have homework to do?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, then maybe you and I can take a look at some of those college applications. Did you know that the early decision deadline is coming up?”

  “Sort of.”

  Mom stared down at him. His sister Shannan had made it pretty easy for them. She applied to three schools and got into all three. She probably had the applications done the summer after junior year. She was in the engineering program at the U of Maine in Orono, something their parents seemed both puzzled and proud about. His father was co-owner of a printing and graphic design business, and his mom was a social worker helping old people get meals on wheels and stuff like that. More arts and words people than numbers people. It was one of those lines they spouted when talking about Shannan to other people. Even if they didn’t fully get it, they were proud of her. That was good. They should have at least one kid to brag about.

  “Well,” his mother started, “I just think that . . .”

  “Fine.” Ben rolled over and stuffed his face into the pillow. “We can talk about it. But I need to take a shower first.”

  “Okay, great!” his mom said happily. Then she sniffed the room. “Ben, are you hung-over?”

  “No!” he shouted into the pillow. “Shower!” he shouted again.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, I’ll be downstairs. Just come down when you’re ready.” There was a pause. “Ben, was Tyler here?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I wish he wouldn’t do that. Leave in the middle of the night, I mean.”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “I just don’t like the idea of him driving home so late.”

  “Better than driving drunk.”

  “I thought you said you weren’t drinking.”

  Ben gave a loud exasperated sigh. “Tyler, Mom, not me.” It sounded like a lame excuse, but it was true. He drank, but never enough to lose control.

  “All right,” she sighed. There was another pause before she left the room. Like there was more she wanted to say about Tyler. Or was she going to make it about him? Ben didn’t lift his head off the pillow. He could talk about pretty much anything with his parents, but this topic felt off-limits. Maybe because they would ask questions about Tyler that he couldn’t answer himself.

  Chapter 3

  There were only a few minutes until homeroom, and the main hallway was packed with people. Even with all the background noise, Ben could tell he was being followed, and he had a pretty good idea who it was. Abby Simmons was the absolute, unqualified bane of his existence. Her title was Hearing Impaired Integrator or some other crap thing like that. She was worse than a teacher who just tried to pretend he was like everyone else. The whole point of Abby Simmons was to make him stick out—that was her frickin’ job.

  “Ben!” Oh shit, she was shouting. He’d have to stop now or risk creating an even bigger scene. He turned around, scanning the hall for an alcove or open classroom he could duck into to avoid being seen with her. No such luck. He was stuck in the hallway, where the kids flowing by stared at him openly.

  “Hi!” she said brightly when he finally met her gaze. Her hands flew up to start signing, and then, just as quickly, she dropped them.

  In their first meeting, he’d made it very clear that he didn’t know ASL and didn’t have any interest in learning. “I know you don’t need it,” she had told him, “but it’s a lot of fun. And it can be a good way to get involved with the community.” Ben had cringed. He found it really hard to understand what was fun about sign language or, for that matter, why you would want to isolate yourself from normal people so you could hang out with a bunch of weirdos who were talking with their hands.

  Midway through third grade, their elementary school had gotten an upgrade on textbooks. He hated them. They featured a series of diverse characters with weird names and, in some cases, physical disabilities. Suzy and Elizabeth were replaced by Raga and Hassan and their friend Jamyle who rode around in a wheelchair, accompanying his friends on all sorts of canned fictional adventures. It became a thing among the kids to ask about Jamyle and how he was able to participate in the various adventures to the science museum and the rope swing. Their teacher, a young woman whose name Ben had forgotten, took their interest to be genuine instead of trying to get her off topic, and spent what felt like hours talking to the class in uncomfortable terms about the normalcy of people with disabilities. Ben had never felt less normal in his life.

  Abby was smiling brightly at him. Had she asked him a question? It was loud in the hallway, but he would rather have died than ask her to repeat herself. “Okay, I guess,” he said, hoping she had asked him how he was doing.

  But he wasn’t that lucky. “Really?” she exclaimed. “That’s great!” Shit, what had he just agreed to? “I’ll call you down tomorrow when he gets here.” Ben’s mind whirled, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask her what she was talking about so he could come up with a reasonable excuse, and he couldn’t simply refuse now without knowing what he was refusing. As much as he couldn’t stand her, she was hard to just plain hate. She seemed to truly want some kind of relationship with him, and the patheticness of this made her annoying as all hell but not hateable. She beamed at him, showing her horsey teeth. Her hair, pulled back into a half ponytail, was a little greasy at the roots.

  “I gotta go,” he said and gestured down the hallway at some unknown destination. Anywhere but here was preferable.

  “Oh, sure,” she said, “get to class on time.” She smiled like she wanted him to acknowledge that she was some kind of cool teacher because she wanted the kids to call her by her first name and would never really tell him to get to class on time. “You know,” she added, “we’re still meeting on Wednesday afternoons if you’re ever interested in checking it out. It’s a really fun group.”

  “No,” he said. She seemed momentarily taken aback by the sharpness of his tone. “I mean, I’m busy, with soccer and other things.”

  “Oh right,” she said. “That’s so exciting! The State Championship.”

  “Well, it’s just the playoffs right now. We have to win three more games to get to States.”

  “Sure, States,” she agreed, happily.

  Ben started to turn away, unable to think of any less awkward way to end the conversation. He pointed down the hall, and she just smiled again and kept nodding her head. He had a sudden vision of her as a high school student, greasy hair and all, and realized that it probably hadn’t been
that different for her than it was now. He couldn’t imagine coming back to spend your life in a place where you had been so socially unsuccessful. It was a bit like watching a video game character get stuck in a corner, bouncing back and forth between two hard surfaces.

  The annoying interaction with Abby Simmons stayed with him for most of first and second periods, but by the end of the day he’d managed to let it go. After school the mood in the locker room was somber. “Jerk Sausage knows about the party on Saturday night,” Tyler whispered to him as he changed for practice. That meant they’d be running today, more than usual. Coach was a fitness fanatic. The rumor was he got up at four thirty every morning to work out before school, ran at practice with the team, and then ran on his own after school. He ate almost no carbs—something called a paleo diet he was always trying to talk to his players about. He was the winningest high school coach in the Eastern Massachusetts League, and there was always talk that this would be his last season before moving up to a college team. And he was gay. Easton was a liberal enough town to accept an openly gay soccer coach, as long as he was winning.

  “On the field, gentlemen!” Coach’s voice boomed in the locker room and was punctuated by two quick fists to a locker door. Clearly Coach knew what had gone on the night before. Their warm-up run was twice as long as usual, and the normal relaxed feel of their drills was missing. And instead of letting Ben, who played goalie, go off with the other defenders and let them take shots on him, he kept everyone together and kept them moving through a particularly brutal drill that he called the Eliminator. If you missed a pass, you had to run sprints and up-downs until the next person missed and you could go back in. It was kind of twisted in that the only way to get out of your mistake was to hope for someone else to screw up.